Persuasive academic

Being a moderate can make you a lot of enemies in some parts of the world, as Nils Muižnieks knows. As a top human-rights expert in Latvia in the uneasy 1990s, and later as integration minister, he tried to steer a reasonable middle path between unforgiving nationalists and obdurate Slavic minorities over how to naturalise so-called non-citizens – an explosive issue that at the time was germane to Latvia’s aspirations to join the EU. Muižnieks believed that the state should do more to integrate non-citizens – mainly ethnic Russians who numbered more than half a million – and wanted the rules to be relaxed, especially for children of non-citizens born after 1991, when Latvia regained its independence.

Not surprisingly, patriots of all masts impugned him, in tones that were perhaps most poignant in Muižnieks’ native United States. The Latvian émigré community there, whose elders were once refugees from the communist occupation during the Second World War, tends to be Russophobic. “It’s clear that by staking out the middle ground and a human rights-based approach to minority issues in Latvia, you’re not going to win any popularity contests, and I took a lot of flak. But that goes with the turf. You develop a thick skin,” Muižnieks says. With a chuckle, he adds, “When you’re criticised by both extreme Latvians and extreme Russians then you know you’re doing something right.”

Such wisdom, and wit, will certainly help Muižnieks as the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, a post he took up in April, after mustering a razor-thin majority of votes in its parliamentary assembly. He now has an entire continent of some 700 million people to monitor, from standard-bearers such as Netherlands and Sweden to rights-wastelands such as Russia. It is a portfolio he describes as “intense” and “humbling”. “Forty-seven countries in the full spectrum of human rights issues is a challenging task. I’m learning something every day,” he told European Voice.

Importantly, Muižnieks’ six-year term is destined to coincide with the EU’s ongoing economic turmoil, and this clearly has the commissioner worried. “Austerity and the crisis affect human rights across the board…The most vulnerable groups are hit when budgets are cut – children, elderly with low pensions, the disabled, migrants. But it also affects political rights…and feeds into racism and xenophobia,” says the commissioner, who plans to visit Greece next month to assess the situation in Europe’s most troubled economy. “My task, as I see it, is to inject a human-rights voice into the budget debate.”

There are, of course, several personal goals. First, Muižnieks wants to help countries with a backlog of cases before the European Court of Human Rights. He says 60% of all the court’s cases fall on five countries – Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Italy – and addressing this gridlock will be crucial to smoothing the court’s operations in the future. Second, he would like to see the Council of Europe spearhead human-rights work via the internet and social media. “If we want to engage the younger generation that lives on the internet, we have to be there,” he says. Finally, the commissioner hopes to use his personal experience in post-communist transformation to help problematic countries in the east European neighbourhood.

It is an arduous list, but Muižnieks’ career has honed him well. A son of refugees from Latvia, he graduated from Princeton University with a political science degree, and went on to obtain a doctorate – written on independence movements in the Soviet Union’s dying years – from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993. It was the same year he and his wife, Andra, also the child of refugees, moved to Latvia, which at the time was infested with organised crime and still had Russian troops. It was a life-changing gamble: “Latvia in the 1990s was an incredibly dynamic place,” he says. “A lot of things were politically possible that wouldn’t have been in ordinary times.”

From the start, Muižnieks took up the mantle of minority rights – Latvia’s Achilles’ heel given that 40% of population consisted of ethnic minorities – and in 1994 was appointed director of the Latvian Centre for Human Rights and Ethnic Studies, where he soon pinpointed his primary goal as rights education. “I had a number of encounters with Latvian bureaucracies, which in the early 1990s were very Soviet and treated [people] like dirt. And I had been [raised] to think that I had rights, and that the government worked for me. This was not a common sentiment at the time,” he says.

Fact File

1964: Born, United States

1986: Bachelor’s degree in political science, Princeton

1988: Master’s degree in political science, University of California at Berkeley

2004-12: Director, Advanced Social and Political Research Institute, University of Latvia

2012-: Commissioner for human rights, Council of Europe

His work over the next eight years was instrumental in preparing Latvia for accession to the EU and NATO, and when, in 2002, the finish line came into view, Muižnieks was asked to join the government as minister for integration. It was an academic’s foray into the grimy world of Baltic politics, and for the most part it was not a happy experience. He began as a non-party minister, but came under attack by nationalists and fled for cover into Latvia’s First Party, a gang of holier-than-thou businessmen who have since fallen into deep disgrace and are certain to go down in the history books in unflattering terms. One of Muižnieks’ pet projects, anti-discrimination legislation, died in parliament.

The ordeal ended in 2004, and Muižnieks returned to the familiar turf of academia – of copious reports and hair-splitting analyses – where he was once again able to shine. He enrolled in the Goethe Institute to learn German (he is fluent in Latvian, Russian, and French as well as English) and, as director of a socio-political research institute at the University of Latvia, wrote articles and edited books at a blistering pace, particularly about Russian-Latvian relations. “He’s very hard-working, and the stuff he’s done has been very valuable for Latvia,” says Pauls Raudseps, a political commentator who has known Muižnieks for nearly three decades. “He raised the profile of issues that lots of people didn’t want to talk about.”

Raising awareness of gay and lesbian rights in Moscow or prisoners’ rights in Kiev is distressingly Sisyphean. But the commissioner, who has recently embraced fishing to relieve the stresses of Strasbourg, puts on a brave face. “The primary tools at my disposal are persuasion and professional analysis,” he says. Beyond that, he admits that there is nothing he can do “if countries don’t want to help themselves”.

Muižnieks will get some support with the more awkward countries from Stavros Lambrinidis, the EU’s special envoy of human rights who took up this newly-created post in September. The two recently met in Brussels, and Muižnieks believes there is room for co-operation in freedom of expression on the internet and gay and lesbian rights in non-EU countries that are members of the Council of Europe.